Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

'Creationism' in free schools: the whiff of a witch-hunt

The British Humanist Association is trying to whip up anxiety about "Creationist" free schools scheduled to open in 2012 and 2013. This is from a BHA press release:

Grindon Hall Christian School in Sunderland, currently a private all-through school but approved last October by the Department for Education to open as a Free School from this September, has a "Creation Policy" on its website in which they "affirm that to believe in God’s creation of the world is an entirely respectable position scientifically and rationally" and state they will "teach creation as a scientific theory"; while Sevenoaks Christian School, a secondary school in Kent approved to open from 2013, sets out the creationist beliefs of the school’s founders, and explains that creationism will be taught in Religious Education (RE).

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has approved three free schools run by groups with creationist views, including one with a document on its website declaring that it teaches "creation as a scientific theory".

But, reading the BHA's fulminations, I can't help wondering if it isn't indulging in a little intelligent design of its own.

Don't get me wrong: I don't believe we should permit hardline Creationist schools to operate in this country. Why? Because they would teach children pseudoscience. Evolution is not merely one "theory" among many. The evidence for evolution by natural selection – and that includes the evolution of homo sapiens from its predecessors – is overwhelming. Nothing in biology makes sense without Darwin's insights.

But none of these free schools will be allowed to teach "scientific" Creationism, with its brazen manipulation of the fossil record to "fit" the Book of Genesis, in science classes. Nor can they teach the marginally more sophisticated intelligent design, once nicely summed up as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo".

Will these free schools merely shift Creationism's fake science from biology to RE lessons? Michael Gove says they won't be allowed to. Clearly, the situation needs to be monitored – in Islamic schools as well as Christian ones. (Islam is far and away the most important disseminator of Creationism in the modern world, a point rarely stressed by the BBC/Guardian.)

Actually, I'm not clear that these new schools are Creationist. The evangelical Christians who run them may privately reject evolution, in which case it's the Government's job to make sure that they don't undermine the discoveries of scientists in any lessons. But Grindon Hall says the following: "[We do] not share the rigid creationist’s insistence on a literalistic interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis … We are therefore very happy to believe that God could have created the world in six days. But we do not feel that it is helpful to affirm it as an unarguable fact." That's what I regard as a traditional Christian viewpoint rather than anything an American fundamentalist would recognise as Creationism.

The nearest any of these schools get to "scientific" Creationism are the following statements from Grindon Hall:

We vigorously challenge the unscientific certainty often claimed by scientists surrounding the so-called “Big Bang” and origins generally.

We will teach evolution as an established scientific principle, as far as it goes.

We will teach creation as a scientific theory and we will always affirm very clearly our position as Christians, i.e. that Christians believe that God’s creation of the world is not just a theory but a fact with eternal consequences for our planet and for every person who has ever lived on it.

These sentences are too loosely phrased for us to be clear what, exactly, the school means by creation – or science, for that matter. Attempts to reconcile belief in God-as-creator and empirical data often produce evasive statements, not least in unthreatening mainstream denominations. As I say, if there's a hidden agenda, then it's the Government's job to make sure it isn't implemented. The key challenge is distinguishing between religious cosmology and false empirical claims – not easy, but it has to be done. There is a difference between saying that God's creation of the world doesn't conflict with science and is therefore in some way "scientific", and extracting bogus science from the Bible or Koran. There's also a difference between saying that evolution doesn't explain everything (which is true) and claiming that there are significant holes in the theory (which there aren't).

The reason I've used the word "witch-hunt" in the headline is that I suspect the real target of the BHA/Guardian campaign is not the teaching of pseudoscience in classrooms, but Christianity in general (this poisonous piece by Hadley Freeman captures the ultra-secularist mindset perfectly). Plus, of course, the institution of free schools, the success of which has infuriated the Left.

It poses the question: what do "humanists" fear more – the teaching of bad science, or the freedom of parents to run their own schools?